Peter Flavel doesn’t give secrets away easily.
A gentle probe about “that client” is quietly slid away by the Coutts CEO with a “yes, well, we never confirm or deny”. The brute force approach: “you’re the Queen’s bank manager!” is laughed off and the subject changed so subtly that I barely noticed he’d done it.
If the Queen is on his books (and she is), Her Majesty’s finances are safe with him. With his comfy red jumper and open necked shirt Peter may be dressed and sound more like a kindly uncle than a financial leader, but there’s an armour there too. It is possible to crack it, though.
Ask him about the history of the bank he’s helmed since 2016. His eyes widen with excitement, and he leans forward. Careful wording is cast aside. The gossip is 330 year’s old, but he tells it like it’s hot off the London Gazette presses (the Standard came more than a century later).
“I’ve become a bit of a geek on the Coutts family,” he says, revealing that one of the first things he did on arriving at 440 The Strand was get hold of the archivist. “Thomas Coutts. His grand-daughter Angela Burdett-Coutts; 1st Baroness in her own right. ‘Queen of the Poor’. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful story.”
The way he tells it, it really is. Thomas Coutts’ massive investments in the arts; Angela’s renowned philanthropy - and the rumours that swirled when she moved in with her governess. After the recording we chat about the Coutts family until my Zoom time runs out. “Have you got another few minutes?” he asks. I remind him that he’s the one running one of the largest private banks in the country; I’m just making a podcast. “I could talk for hours about this,” he says.
But that’s for another show.
This one, the first in our new business series ‘An Invitation to Meet..’, is about what Coutts is doing today – and part of the problem is its past.
“When most people think of Coutts,” he admits, “they think of landed estates, and old wealth and old money. But actually, at the heart of it, when you get under the bonnet we bank 20,000 really successful and influential entrepreneurs.”
That’s rumoured to include people like south London rapper Stormzy, but it’s the field of what Peter calls “interactive entertainment” where he says the bank is making the most headway. Again though, while the Coutts brand may be iconic in financial, and historical, circles, it’s often not the first place the new generation of wannabes think about as the cash starts coming in.
“Most of the young entrepreneurs that we bring into the bank have never heard of Coutts when we make contact,” Peter admits with a modest laugh. “We say, listen, you’re about to create considerable money and we’d like to talk about what you’re going to do with the wealth that you’re going to create.”
That might sound like an old-school line from any era of banking, but these are the days of Cop26, Greta Thunberg, and dire warnings about the fate of our planet. Today, when Coutts asks a client “what are you going to do with the money,” it’s not just about how to make more.
“With wealth comes responsibility…” Peter says, before I interrupt with a joke about Spiderman’s uncle and that line: “with great power comes great responsibility”.
“Well, it sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?” he admits with perhaps a little embarrassment, “But it is true. It is true that people who have amassed considerable wealth have a responsibility to their family and to their community.”
‘Community,’ here means the world. Last year, Coutts became the first private bank in the UK to achieve B-Corp status. That’s a certification awarded by the non-profit B-Lab organisation, formed in Pennsylvania in 2006, to promote “business as a force for good” with conservation at its heart. Around 4,500 companies across 78 countries are now onboard. It’s supported by people like Madeleine Allbright, who became the first female Secretary of State in US history under Bill Clinton.
It's not easy to become a member. Peter says it took Coutts two years to achieve, following a rigorous B-Lab assessment that looked at the impact of the bank’s governance, staff, clients, the environment and community on the planet. The assessments are ongoing, so members have to show continuous improvement or lose their certificate. Being a bank though, it wasn’t just their own affairs they had to get in order.
“When we look at the carbon footprint of Coutts, only ten percent is the way we do our business ” he says. “90 percent is the carbon footprint of the monies we invest on behalf of our clients. So if we want to make an impact, we need think about the way we’re investing client monies.”
The work really began shortly after Peter took the helm six years ago. There was a survey of clients, that showed 75% wanted the bank to use Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) filters when investing. But half of them wanted the same or better returns. After 18 months research, Coutts thought it could do that; the question was whether or not to open up a new set of green funds to run alongside the existing ones, or go all in? Peter chose the latter.
“If we believe in this, actually all of our funds should be invested with ESG filters. So now the only way you can invest in Coutts is through these filters,” he says. “And so once we took that step, how do we hold our head high and show people that this isn’t ‘greenwashing’? And that’s when we came to B-Corp.”
The advantages to a bank trying to demonstrate a modern face are obvious, and Peter says they have brought new clients onboard as a result of gaining B-Corp status, but the speed at which they took the new direction intrigues me. If all of this happened in the first days of him being in charge, is this something important to him personally?
“Look, it is,” he confirms and tells me about his upbringing in Adelaide, south Australia, the driest area of the driest continent on Earth. Reminiscing about his holidays looking after the animals on his grandfather’s farm he confesses he wanted to be a vet before realising he’d be “better off in the office than the paddock”. Those childhood days, seeing his grandfather toil on dust, had a lasting impact on him.
“Water was a really important resource, which I grew up actually valuing,” he says. “My grandfather wouldn’t call himself a conservationist, but we would call him a conservationist because he understood and valued the land because water was so darned difficult. So when it rained, it was like winning the lottery!”
An international career that’s seen him work in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and Asia only reinforced those views. He talks with frustration about his time living in Singapore and people having to deal with smoke pouring in from neighbouring Indonesia as palm oil farmers take the quick route of burning the forests instead of taking time to pull the trees out and replant. He says he’s seen the consequences of what taking the short cut does, and truly knows the “impact on the environment can be quite considerable.”
Peter was at Cop26 in Glasgow and talks about listening to Senator John Kerry on how the summit would be a success “because business and finance are in the room,” and it’s not just governments and regulators. That concluded with an agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 with the aim of hitting net zero by 2050. Some countries have set different targets, like India which is aiming for 2070. Some scientists, like the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, have said it’s all “too little too late” while some industry leaders have said it’s happening too fast. Peter thinks the targets “recognise the work that needs to be done.” But can it?
“Let’s be kind to ourselves here a little bit, but not too kind,” Peter says when I ask about the deadlines. “It’s just not physically possible to do it in two or three years. That equation can’t be solved. So, the plans that we’re putting together today are a bit nascent. They’re a bit wooly… but we need to take steps right now, realising that in three years or five years we could have done that a bit better. But that’s not a reason not to start now.”
I also ask Peter what it’s really like being CEO of Coutts? I want to go back to his first day, taking his seat at his desk, with all those years of history behind him, and a client list of some of the most notable names in the country (even if he can’t admit it).
“It was overwhelming,” he says. “I feel very fortunate as I walk into my office and I look down the Mall towards the palace, I do pinch myself at times.”
I think you can take that two ways. It’s a perfectly factual statement. But maybe there’s a hint of the kid who grew up on an Adelaide farm and found himself with a position of influence, of responsibility, that he could probably never have imagined, perhaps stretching all the way down that Mall. Wondering, what he’s going to do with it?
You can hear the whole interview with Peter in our “Invitation to Meet…” podcast, using the player above, or find it on Acast, Spotify, Apple and all the other places you get your shows.
He’s also a keynote speaker at our SME EXPO event, which is being held at London Olympia on May 25th and 26th. Get free tickets, and find out more about the event, here.
